settled, and once thickly settled parts that have grown up to wild
woods and wastes since the war. In old times the slave had a
half-holiday on Saturday, which custom the colored brother still keeps
up; and a more picturesque scene is not to be found than that
presented by a town, say of three thousand inhabitants, where the
county has seven colored people to one white.
Never was such a motley company gathered in one place,--old men with
grizzled heads, all with a rabbit-foot in their pocket, a necklace for
a charm around their necks, their bronzed breasts open to view; old
mammies with scarlet bandannas; young belles of all shades--here a
mulatto girl in pale-blue dress and pointed shoes, her waist as
disfigured as any Parisian's, there a mammoth, coal-black negro
driving a pair of splendid mules.
Here is an original turnout; it was once a sulky. The shafts stick out
above the great ears of the mule; the seat has been replaced by an old
rocking-chair; the wheels are wired-up pieces of a small barrel that
have replaced some of the spokes, while fully half the harness is made
up of rope, string, and wire. The owner's clothes are one mass of
patchwork, and his hat is full of holes, out of which the unruly wool
escapes and keeps his hat from blowing off.
The sidewalk presents a moving panorama unmatched for richness of
color. As we leave the town, we ride past plantations that once had
palatial residences, whose owners had from one to three thousand
slaves, the little log cabins arranged around and near the house. In
many cases the houses are still there, but dilapidated.
Here, where each white person was once worth on an average thirty
thousand dollars, to-day you may buy land for a dollar an acre, with
all the buildings. It is a lovely park-like country, with clear
streams running through meadows, branching into a dozen channels,
where the fish dart about; and the trees shade and perfume the air
with their rich blossoms, and the whole region is made exquisitely
vocal with the song of the peerless mocking-bird. Here, too, the
marble crops out from the soil, and some of the richest iron ore in
the world, all waiting for the spirit of enterprise to turn the land
into an Eldorado.
To be sure, there are obstacles; but the Southern man of to-day was
born into conditions for which he is not responsible, any more than
his father and ancestors before him were responsible for theirs. And
those that started the trouble lived in a day when men knew no better.
Did not old John Hawkins as he sailed the seas in his good ship Jesus,
packed with Guinea negroes, praise God for his great success? So we
find the men of that day piously presenting their pastor and the
church with a good slave, and considering it a meritorious action.
Time, with colonies settling in the new South, will yet bring back
prosperity without the old taint, and keep step with all that is good
in the nation. It cannot be done at once. I knew an energetic American
who had built a town, and thought he would go South, and at least
start another; but, said he, "I had not been there a week when I felt,
as I rocked to and fro, listening to the music of the birds, and
catching the fragrance of the jessamine, that I did not care whether
school kept or not."
There is no great virtue in the activity that walks fast to keep from
freezing. We owe a large portion of our goodness to Jack Frost.
Dr. Ryder tells a story of one of our commercial travellers who had
been overtaken by night, and had slept in the home of a poor white.
In the morning he naturally asked whether he could wash. "Ye can, I
reckon, down to the branch." A little boy belonging to the house
followed him; for such clothes and jewellery the lad had never before
seen. After seeing the man wash, shave, and clean his teeth, he could
hold in no longer, and said,--
"Mister, do you wash every day?"
"Yep."
"And scrape yer face with that knife?"
"Yep."
"And rub yer teeth too?"
"Yep."
"Wal, yer must be an awful lot of trouble to yerself."
Civilization undoubtedly means an awful lot of trouble.
VIII.
ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN.
The frontier is the place to find all sorts of conditions and also of
men. Monotony is not one of the troubles of the minute-man. He is
frequently too poor to dress in a ministerial style, and quite often
he is not known until he begins the services. This sometimes leads to
the serio-comic, as witness the following:--
Our man was looking over a portion of the country where he wished to
locate, and in making the necessary inquiries he asked many questions
about homesteads and timber claims. Notice having been given that
there would be preaching at the schoolhouse, the people assembled; and
while waiting for the preacher, they discussed this stranger, whom
they all thought to be a claim jumper. He certainly was not a very
handsome man. They proposed to hang him to the first tree. Trees were
scarce there, and possibly that fact saved him. He came up while they
were talking, entered the schoolhouse, and from the desk told them he
was the preacher, and was going to settle among them. Here was a
promising field, where people were ready to hang a man on their way to
church. It is a fact that where we find people ready for deeds of this
kind we have the material for old-fashioned revivals of the Cartwright
type.
When Jesse James was shot, it was easy to find a man to preach a
sermon full of hope to the bereaved relations, and to crown the
ruffian with martyrdom.
The minute-man has some hair-breadth escapes. He comes upon a crowd of
so-called vigilants, who have just hanged some men for horse-thievery;
and, as he has on store-clothes, he narrowly escapes the same fate. In
one instance he was able to prove too late that they had hanged an
innocent lad; and in that case the poor boy had not only pleaded his
innocence but had explained that he was tired, and had been invited to
ride by the gang who had stolen the horses, the men themselves
corroborating his story; but it did not avail; and the poor boy was
strung up, and a mother's heart was broken in the far East. Often
these border ruffians act from unaccountable impulse, just as the
Indians would torture some captives and adopt others from mere whim.
It is an awful commentary on the condition of things on our frontiers,
that a man has a better chance of escape when he has murdered a fellow
creature than when he has stolen a horse. And yet in this year 1895, I
have seen a man who was trying in vain to sell a horse for $1.50.
To illustrate how much more valuable life is than gold, a minister
relates this anecdote of a California miner who, to save a young girl
in a shipwreck, threw his belt of gold away and saved her life. After
the meeting was over a matronly woman came up to him and said, "Sir,
I was the young girl the miner saved." Or he enters a log house, and
finds a beautiful woman and her no less beautiful daughter, and soon
learns that, a few years before, they were moving among the brilliant
throng that surround royalty in Europe; and in that little room the
mother has the dress and some of the jewels in which she was presented
to Queen Victoria. He finds them in the little log house, apparently
contented; but there is a romance and a mystery here that many would
like to unravel. Or, maybe, he enters the neat frame house of a
broken-down Wall-street stockbroker, who with the remnants of his
fortune hopes to retrieve himself upon his one hundred and sixty acre
homestead, and who, with his refined and cultured family, makes an
oasis in the desert for the tired missionary.
In the winter he sometimes rides a hundred miles to Conference, and
time and again is upset as he attempts to pass through the immense
drifts. His harness gives way when he is miles from a house; and he
must patch it up as best he can from the other harness, and lead one
horse. He must learn to ride a tricking broncho, to sleep out on the
prairie, to cover himself with a snowdrift to keep from freezing, and
in case of extremity to kill his horse and crawl inside, perhaps
barely to escape with his life as the warm body changes into a
refrigerator. If he lives in a sod house, he must often put the sheets
above his head to keep away the lizards that crawl out as the weather
becomes warm, and an occasional rattler waking up from his torpid
winter sleep. At times the rains thaw his roof out, and it drops too;
and then he must reshingle with sod.
Often he is called to go forty and fifty miles to visit the sick, to
sit up with the dying, and to cheer their last moments. He can and
does do more useful work when attending the poor and sickly than in
any other way. Many a family has been won through the devotion of the
minute-man to some poor little sufferer.
One day he meets a man hauling wood with a pair of wretched mules. The
man is dressed in blue denim, the trousers are stuffed into boots that
are full of holes. A great sombrero hat is on his head. By his side is
a beautiful young woman. She is the wife. He finds on inquiry that the
man has been a brilliant preacher, writer, and lecturer; yet here, two
thousand miles from his Eastern home, he is hauling railway ties for a
living.
I once visited a family living in a house so small that the kitchen
would barely hold more than one person at a time. There was a sick man
there, whom I used to call upon two and three times a week. In order
to turn himself, he had a leather strap hung from the rafters. The
woman of the house was of a cruel disposition. She was the second wife
of the sick man's brother, and had a daughter who was about thirteen
years of age, but who was large for her years. I used to find this
child working about in her bare feet and singing, "I'm so glad that my
Father in heaven." And I felt quite encouraged, as the child had a bad
reputation.
One day this girl came to the parsonage and brought a silver
napkin-ring, saying it was a New Year's gift, and that her mother was
sorry she could not have engraved upon it "For my dear _pasture_." My
wife said we ought not to take it; but I replied,--
"Yes; these people get fair wages, and would feel offended."
So we kept it. Some days after, as two men were felling a large
pine-tree which was hollow at the base, they were surprised to see
albums, bracelets, napkin-rings, combs, spoons, and other articles
falling out. About this time a saleswoman had been missing just such
things from her counter; and it was soon discovered that my youthful
convert was a first-class kleptomaniac, equal to any city thief of
the same class. Her mode of operation was to call the woman's
attention to something on the shelf behind her; then taking anything
within reach, and with an "Oh, how pretty!" she would decamp.
I met the mother on my way to visit the sick man. "O Elder!" she said,
"I am in a peck of trouble. That gal of mine has cleared off on a raft
with a lumberman, and she has been stealing too. What shall I do?"
As I knew that the woman had tied the girl's tongue with whip-cord,
and beaten it with birch bark until it bled, to cure her of lying, I
said, "You had better send her to the Reform School." It appeared
afterward that the man who had run off with the girl was a minister's
son; and he said in court he had taken pity on the girl, and wanted to
save her from the cruelty of her mother. The girl was sent to the
Reform School at Adrian, but not before she had given the sheriff the
slip, and taken another girl with her, getting as far as Rochester,
N. Y., before she was recaptured.
Sometimes in these frontier towns the sermon is stopped in a most
unexpected way. I remember one good man preaching on Jacob. An old
woman, who was sitting on the front bench, became deeply interested;
and when the minister said, "When the morning came, Jacob, who had
served all these long years for his wife, found not the beautiful
Rachel, but the weak-eyed Leah," the old lady broke out with "Oh, my
God, what a pity!" That ended the discourse, and the benediction was
omitted.
In another back settlement a young student was preaching on the
Prodigal Son. "And what, my friends, would you have done had your son
come home in that way after such conduct?" The answer was prompt, "I
would have shot the boy, and saved the calf."
[Illustration: A SOUTHERN SAWMILL.
_Page 91._]
IX.
THE SOUTH IN SPRINGTIME.
"You are going the wrong time of the year," was the reiterated warning
of friends who heard that I was to make a Southern trip. Experience
proved them to be as far astray as if they had warned one from going
North in June; for the May of the South is the June of the North.
Nature was revelling in her fullest dress, making a symphony in
green,--all shades, from the pale tint of the chinquapin and
persimmon, to the deep indigo of the long-leafed pine, and the tender
purple green of the distant hills,--a perfect extravaganza of
vegetable growth.
The weather was delicious; from the south and east came the ocean air,
and from the north and west the balsam-laden ozone of the mountains,
every turn in the road revealing new beauties. The cool Southern
homes, with their wide verandas covered with honeysuckle, and great
hallways running right through the house, often revealing some of the
daintiest little pictures of light and shade, from apple or china tree
varied with the holly, the Cape jasmine, and scuppernong vines, the
latter often covering a half-acre of land, while chanticleer and his
seraglio strutted in proud content, monarch of all he surveyed. High
on a pole hung the hollowed gourds, homes for the martins and
swallows. The mistress sat at her sewing in the shady porch, while out
beyond, under a giant oak, with gracefully twined turban and brilliant
dress, the sable washerwoman hung out her many-colored pieces, making
altogether a scene of rural beauty seldom surpassed.
What joy to sit in the ample porch and look over the great
cotton-fields with their regular rows of bluish green, variegated by
the tender hue of the young corn, and a dozen shades of as many
species of oak, while the brilliant tulip-tree and the distant hills,
now of softest blue, contrasting with the rich, red ochre of the soil,
make up a picture never to be forgotten. Cooled by the breezes that
sweep through the porch, one dozes away an hour of enchantment. The
negroes with their mules, in the distance, in almost every field, add
to its piquancy, and often, floating on the wind, come wild snatches
in weird minor notes the broken rhythm of their old Virginia reel,
performed with the rollicking exuberance of the race.
The reader must not suppose that all Southern homes answer to the
above description. Thousands of houses are without a porch or any
shade save that which nature gives. The chimneys are built on the
outside, sometimes of stone, sometimes of brick or of clay, while
layers of one-inch slats hold the chimney together; but, as a rule, so
prodigal is nature that a vine of some kind will entwine around their
otherwise bare and severe outlines, and make them, like some dogs,
homely enough to be handsome.
Although these poorer houses are devoid of all artificial attempts to
beautify, they are frequently built near a great oak and the dense
china-tree for shade, while wild fruits of many kinds grow
promiscuously about. In every hedgerow, and within a stone's throw of
nearly every country home, will be found partridges, wild pigeons, and
all sorts of small game, with plenty of foxes to keep it in reasonable
bounds, while every household has a number of hounds and curs for the
foxes. But with all the varied beauty of the scene, the New Englander
constantly misses the well-kept lawn,--for here bare ground always
takes the place of grass,--and there are no village green and fine
shaded roads, and that general neatness which distinguishes the rural
scenes of "the Pilgrim land."
A few words about the people. They are as warm-hearted as their
climate; the stranger is greeted with such invitations as these:
"Come in;" "Take a chair;" "Have some of the fry;" "Have some fresh
water." They are up with the sun--family prayer by five, A.M.;
breakfast half an hour later; dinner at one; supper at seven; to bed
by dark. The churches are plain, costing seldom more than eight
hundred or one thousand dollars; doors on all sides opposite each
other to allow for a good circulation of air. A pail of water stands
on a form near the pulpit. The church generally stands in a grove or
the forest itself.
The people are very fond of preaching. The whole family, from the
oldest to the youngest, go; and one may often see the mother at the
communion with a little one at the breast. Sometimes eleven or more of
a family will occupy a wagon filled with oak-splint chairs.
It takes one back thirty years ago to the West, as one stands at the
church-door and sees the people flocking in through winding roads in
the woods, the sunlight and shadow dancing upon the moving teams that
shine like satin in the bright morning air. The dogs are wild with
delight as they start a covey of partridges, and make music in the
deep shadows of the woods. Here a group of young men and maidens are
drinking at the spring.
The preacher often is a jack-of-all-trades--sometimes a doctor,
getting his degree from the family medicine-book; and strange to say,
though an ardent believer in faith-cure, and with marvellous accounts
of cures in answer to prayer, yet prescribing a liver invigorator when
that organ is in trouble. Some of these men are natural orators, and
with their bursts of eloquence often hush their hearers to holy awe
and inspiration. They have one book, and believe it. No doubts trouble
them. Higher criticism has never reached them. Mosaic origin of the
Pentateuch is unquestioned. Moses and no other, to them, wrote the
five books, including the account of his own burial. They know
nothing of pre-exilic Psalms or Greek periods of Daniel; but all
preach Jesus, no matter whence they draw their text. In an instant
they make a short cut for Calvary.
One brother, over eighty years of age, walks fifteen miles, and
preaches three times. Some of his sermons take two hours in delivery,
without the aid of a scrap of note; and the talk for days after is on
the sermon. No quarterlies, monthlies, or weeklies lie at home to
divert. No lecturer strays to that region. Here and there is a village
house with an organ or a piano, and, of course, a paper.
I am speaking of the rural South,--and nearly all the South is rural,
nearly all American, even the cities, with few exceptions, and the
operatives are Southern, and mostly from the farms; so that one may
find a city whose operatives live in another State, across a river, in
a community numbering nearly seven thousand souls, and most of them
keeping pigs and a cow (or, rather, not keeping them, for they roam
at their own sweet will down grassy, ungraded streets). In such a
place one meets old ladies of quite respectable appearance, with the
little snuffing-stick in their mouths, or a pipe; and here one small
grocery shop may sell two hundred dozen of little tin snuff-boxes in a
month! There are cities in the South where you will find as fine
hotels and stores as any on the continent. But from any such city it
is only a step to the most primitive conditions.
Let me describe a characteristic night scene near a large city. My
friend met me at the depot with his little light wagon and diminutive
mule, and we started for the homestead. Our road lay between banks of
honeysuckle that saturated the air with its rich perfume; wild-goose
plum, persimmon, bullice, and chinquapin (the latter somewhat like a
chestnut, but smaller), huckleberries on bushes twelve feet high,
called currants there, lined the road on either side. The house was
surrounded by the _débris_ of former corn-cribs and present ones;
stables were scattered here and there in picturesque confusion. One
end of the house was open, and had been waiting for years for its
chimney; there was shrubbery of every kind all about. I had the usual
hearty welcome and supper, and then attended the inevitable meeting in
the grove.
In the glare of the setting sun everything seemed indescribably
wretched; but it was May, and night came on apace. The stars in the
deep blue glowed like gems; and then the queen of night on her sable
throne threw her glamour over the scene, and the stencil-marked ground
became a fairy scene. High perched upon a mighty oak the mistress of
the grove rained music on the cool night air,--first a twitter like a
chaffinch, then an aria worthy of Patti, then the deep notes of the
blackbird, then a whip-poor-will, then a grand chorus of all the
night-birds.
A short breathing-spell, and off on another chorus, and so the whole
night through. When we awoke the music still poured from that
wondrous throat of the American mocking-bird. How calm, how peaceful,
was the scene, how pure the air! The lights went out from neighboring
cots, and the heavenly hosts seemed to sing together once more the
song of Bethlehem--but alas! Herod plots while angels sing. Not far
off is another little house with its small outbuildings. This night it
is occupied by a mother and three children. The father is away
attending a religious meeting. The servant who usually sleeps in the
house when the man is away gives a trifling excuse and sleeps in the
shed. Before retiring she quietly unfastens the pin which holds the
shutter. At midnight the mother is awakened from her troubled sleep
and sees the shadow of a man, and then another shadow, and still
another. The children shrink to the back of their bunk. Oh, what a
triple crime was enacted under that peaceful sky! Morning came. The
mocking-bird still sang, and cheered the returning husband. But alas,
it was a mocking song for him; for instead of pleasant welcomes, he
found his wife delirious, and his children cowering like hunted
partridges in a neighbor's house. The frenzied husband, soon joined by
friends made furious by the atrocious crime (so common in the South),
soon hunted the ravishers of the little home; and when the moon arose
the next night, the beauty of the scene was marred by three black
corpses swinging from a bridge.
X.
THE NORTH-WEST.
The first impression a man has of the North-west is like Pats in St.
Patrick's Cathedral,--"Begorra, it's bigger inside than out."
Take the map, and see what a little thin strip the upper peninsula of
Michigan makes. Now start on the best train at St. Ignace in the
morning, and it is eight at night before you reach the copper regions
or the Gogebic Range. When I lived in St. Ignace, and the connections
were poor, it took two days to travel from that port to Calumet. If we
went by water we had to sail forty miles east before we doubled Point
Detour; and then we threaded our way among scenes of beauty equal to
the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. Every mile of the way is
alive with historic interest. In St. Ignace lie the bones of Father
Marquette; across the Straits, Mackinaw City, where the terrible
massacre occurred, spoken of by Parkman; midway, is Mackinaw Island,
called by the Indians The Great Turtle.
Here to-day on the Island are the old block forts, and here the little
iron safe in which John Jacob Astor kept his money when in the
fur-trade. Full of natural beauty, to-day the past and present crowd
one another. Here are Indians, half-breeds, and Americans, and modern
hotels. There are no mosquitoes; for the Island is but three miles in
diameter, and the wind blows too strong for them. Here you may find
the lilac in full bloom on the Fourth of July, and in the fall
delicious blue plums that have not been hurt by the black knot. The
daylight is nearly eighteen hours long in midsummer. The people are
sowing oats when the southern farmers in the State are thinking of
cutting theirs. In April, near Grand Rapids, I picked the arbutus. In
early May, at Vanderbilt, I picked it again, and saw pure white snow
in patches in the woods. Later in May I saw it again north of the
Straits of Mackinaw, and in June I found it in the Keweenak Peninsula.
At Hancock I saw a foot of snow compressed under the cordwood, and
some between buildings not exposed to the sun. On account of the
lateness of the season, pease escape the bugs, which are elsewhere so
destructive; and thousands of bushels of seed are sent every year to
the upper Peninsula.